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There was a time when art was all about beauty. Every painting, every sculpture, every piece of music strove to be beautiful. Beauty was the most perfect kind of knowledge, reconciling the sensual and rational parts of the brain.
The movements and isms of the 20th century changed this. Avant-garde intellectuals challenged the accepted notions of aesthetics, and by the end of the century it was the anti-aesthetics of post-modernism that dominated, with conceptual art ruling the roost. Beauty had been rejected, cast out - considered at best irrelevant and frivolous, at worst decadent, oppressive, and wrong. Indeed, so potent was this reaction that it coined a term: kalliphobia.